PS. Events overtook my writing of this blog post. Looking forwards to a resolution of the Stealth Question and the Aircraft Carrier Question.

How would an Iran War be fought?

I already addressed this question on several occasions, most notably on The Road to World War III (see 2.c. The Persian Gulf), as well as here and in a few other places.

Quick overview of different scenarios/strategies in approximate order of severity:

Iranian Strategies

I certainly don’t expect military miracles from a (largely brain drained) 90 IQ nation with largely obsolescent military technologies. It will need outside support from the real Great Powers – that is, Russia and China – to hope to come away with something better than a Pyrrhic victory (at best).

Regardless, Iran does have the capacity to make life hard for the US.

Cyberwar: Advantage = low cost, but will nonetheless likely invite US retaliation, even though the US has been waging cyber war on Iran for years (Stuxnet). I also don’t see it accomplishing much.

Resumption of nuclear program: This is a no brainer at this point, though – if the declarations are seriously followed through upon – they will almost certainly invite eventual Israeli/American strikes. OTOH, Iran has had many years to harden its nuclear facilities. I assume it didn’t sit on its hands during this period, and making blast-resistant concrete is one of the few (only?) areas in which Iran is a world technological leader. If successful, can achieve lasting security, though the end spurt will be fraught with severe dangers.

Attacks on US troops in Iraq: Continuation/intensification of existing policy. The Shiites now hate the US again, enough for them to vote to eject them out of Iraq (with the US apparently refusing to do so while making noises about sanctioning Iraq if it does). So this makes this than even easier option.

Increase support for Houthis: Presumably will happen, though don’t know if they can do much more than what they are already accomplishing.

Missile attacks on US bases: Coffins will make for a visceral show of vengeance, but won’t kill many US soldiers, consolidate the US against them, and will invite a devastating response.

Missile attacks on Israel: Bombing Tel Aviv is very based, redpilled, and powerful (see right), but what happens next? You’ll kill a couple dozen civilians – maybe 100 if you get lucky and get a square hit on an apartment block – but you will now be at war with both Israel and the US with nothing to really show for it. Those missiles would probably serve more productive uses elsewhere. Besides, Iran has Hezbollah to do the heavy lifting in this theater. Too bad for Lebanon, but oh well.

Missile attacks on Saudi oil infrastructure: Oil infrastructure is actually surprisingly resilient to missile attacks (oil and gas pipelines aren’t hard to repair). Iranian IRBMs aren’t very accurate. Perhaps relying on special forces will be more effective, or even better drones, as we saw last June. Of course point defenses at these installations will be strengthened and low hanging fruits will be rapidly picked off. That said, I don’t believe Iran has any chance whatsoever of making a major dent in Saudi oil production even over the medium term.

Close Strait of Hormuz: I have written about this at length before (see links above). This is Iran’s current most feasible “nuclear” option, so long as it doesn’t have actual nukes. I’ll just quote in extenso from my April 2018 article:

Anti-ship missiles: The bulk of the Iranian arsenal is based on Chinese C-802 missiles, which are similar to Harpoons and Exocets. Unless fired in salvoes, the USN can probably deal with them, though they would pose a credible threat to passing oil tankers – enough of a risk, possibly, to get insurers to stop covering the Strait of Hormuz route (which is ultimately what really matters). Ironically, at this point, many of them might start using the Northern Sea Route.

Mines: Iran’s naval mine stockpile is opaque, though its possible that it would be even more of a threat to shipping. It would be helpful to begin mine-laying operations before open outbreak of hostilities if at all possible, since doing so would become far harder afterwards. (However, since the US will be very much on the watch out for this in the wake of its destruction of Syria, a covert mine-laying operation will not stay secret for long).

One solid option would be to keep most of the anti-ship missiles in reserve, and use them primarily to attack US mine-clearing ships (which are less well defended than its capital ships, and far more fragile than double-hulled, multi-compartment oil supertankers). This might even force the US into launching ground operations on the Iranian coast, which will add body-bags to economic pain and possibly plunge it into political crisis.

Major problem – even back then US oil production had reached record highs, and has continued soaring into the stratosphere throughout 2019, so that it now produces more than 50% as much as Russia and Saudi Arabia. In a stunning refutation of the peak oil thesis, it is now close to self-sufficiency in petroleum and other liquids production. The North American continent as a whole would not be in overall surplus.

Of course oil is a globally traded and highly fungible commodity, so while an oil shock would be great for shale oil producers it would still be ruinous for the US economy. However, self-sufficiency opens the possibility of closing off the American or North American market, mitigating the price shock at home while making it even more acute abroad… and tanking the Chinese and European economies in the process. Which would admittedly be a pretty nice side benefit!

Ironically, exercise of Iran’s nuclear option may well actually be much worse for its putative (if fair weather) friend China than for its American nemesis.

US Strategies

US goals seem to consist of some combination of the following elements, although they are implemented in a somewhat haphazard fashion.

• Contain Iran’s potential as a Shiite hegemon in the Middle East.
• Even better, regime change it into a US ally and alternative gas supplier to Europe vs. Russia.
• Avenge the Holy 52.
• Assure Israel’s security in the Middle East, esp. as the sole nuclear power there.

Obama’s policy pursued the more modest objections, containment and denuclearization. The Trump regime’s objectives are more maximalist and have been aggressively pursued, up to and including outrageous human rights violations such as depriving Iranian gamers of League of Legends, as well as much more minor things such as destroying their economy and whacking their generals.

Should they step up their game:

Aeronaval campaign: My take is that modern automotive infrastructure basically annulls air power’s capacity to really cripple an economy (roads are quickly repaired, and there are millions of trucks). Serbian SAMs, despite being heavily outdated, continued posing a threat to NATO fighters to the very end of the campaign. Iran has ten times as many people as Serbia, and 20 times the land area. It is a good bet that Iran is not going to be subdued through pure air power.

Limited occupation: Strait of Hormuz clash is unpredictable IMO since it will test US naval capabilities against Shkvals, Bastions, etc. Geography favors Iran, since there’s plenty of islands and inlets for the Bastions to shelter behind, and the shallow seas will maximize the effectiveness of its three  diesel subs. Also depends on whether Iran can get the jump on the US. May have to undertake limited occupation of Iranian southern coastline to put an end to it, especially if Russia provides support.

Occupy Iran: The US would need at least half a million troops – more likely a million – to effect a wholesale occupation of Iran. This is more or less flat out impossible short of a draft.

Relying on contractors is one thing. But average Americans themselves are not what they once were. The one really nice thing about the “Great Awokening” is that it crimps US capacity to fight imperialist wars.

• More than a third of millennials polled approve of communism
• Army splits with West Point grad who touted communist revolt
• Most upvoted post on /r/ChapoTrapHouse for a couple of days following the assassination of Soleimani calls on draftees to engage in sabotage.

At this point, it will be politically extremely unpopular and may topple the US into unrest if not insurrection.

Chinese/Russian Strategies

Although Iran is hardly an ally or even a good friend of either Russia or China, neither can afford it getting vassalized by the Americans. So we will likely see limited involvement from both of them in support of Iran.

Chinese involvement: Iran’s ability to threaten the Strait of Hormuz presents it with another possibility. China in particular has been recalcitrant about standing up for Iran against the US, e.g. forbidding Kunlun Bank from handling Iran payments (as it did with the pre-JCPOA sanctions). The implicit threat of closing down the Strait of Hormuz may encourage China to play a more cooperative role, especially with respect to financial support, perhaps weapons supplies, etc.

Incidentally, there were already rumors of big deals in the works several months ago:

Among other benefits, Chinese companies will be given the first refusal to bid on any new, stalled or uncompleted oil and gasfield developments. Chinese firms will also have first refusal on opportunities to become involved with any and all petchems projects in Iran, including the provision of technology, systems, process ingredients and personnel required to complete such projects.

“This will include up to 5,000 Chinese security personnel on the ground in Iran to protect Chinese projects, and there will be additional personnel and material available to protect the eventual transit of oil, gas and petchems supply from Iran to China, where necessary, including through the Persian Gulf,” says the Iranian source.

In reality, as pointed out by an Iranian commenter, this was very likely a leak by the Iranians to signal to the Americans that they have options should they refuse to drop sanctions and the Europeans make no effort to mitigate them. Now sure, this would not be optimal from Iran’s perspective, since it would basically make them into an economic colony of China. But they’d hardly have other chances in the event of a “warm” or outright hot war with the US.

Russian involvement: Russia would be stupid to avoid making a US air campaign against Iran even harder, so it would probably support Iran by default. This would presumably involve helping Iran with oil exports (selling its oil as its own), providing weapons, training crews, and perhaps even going head to head against American fighters under conditions of plausible deniability (as during the Korean and Vietnam wars). At the narrow level, this will hone skills and provide access to American miltech. At the broader level, it will create an opening for exploring geopolitical feasibilities elsewhere in its Near Abroad.

Involvement in Iran is not entirely riskless, since Russia’s position in Syria remains vulnerable. But they are substantially mitigated by Russia’s ability to escalate outside that theater (e.g. the Baltics).

This has apparently been getting harder (h/t Betlo):

The panel also noted that it is now more difficult to recruit intelligence sources inside Russia than it was during the Soviet era. During the Soviet era, the CIA relied upon “volunteers” who would approach American intelligence officers, Bearden said, but the pool of Russians willing to betray their government largely has dried up. It is not entirely clear why this is the case, but Bearden suggested that given previous Soviet and Russian penetration of American intelligence services, it is possible that the fear of compromise has driven away many potential sources.

Clement suggested that Russian perceptions of the United States have deteriorated so badly that even educated Russian liberals take a dim view of Washington—making the recruitment of spies extremely difficult. Moreover, many Russians who might have betrayed their government in previous eras no longer feel compelled to risk imprisonment or death by working for the CIA. Instead, those dissidents can simply leave Russia for the West—which was not an option during the Soviet era.

Beebe, however, suggested that in the information age—where biometrics and social media are prevalent—the age of recruiting traditional human intelligence sources is over. “Biometric data means essentially that you can’t put someone under cover here in Washington and then have them travel around the world, pose under diplomatic cover and recruit people,” Beebe said. “Doesn’t work. Who they are, their identity is instantly known to governments that want to know who they are.”

Other reasons:

1. The Russian Federation is 85% Russian, not 50% like the USSR. The guy who revealed the Soviet biological weapons program to the US was called Kanatzhan Alibekov.

2. Internal Russophobia is on the decline. This can even be seen amongst the liberals, where the most odious of that lot have been utterly marginalized, and are demographically dying off (e.g. Novodvorskaya) and/or have moved abroad (e.g. Kasparov).

When the Soviet system existed, there were plenty of people with a strong ideological opposition to the regime, such as Vasily Mitrokhin, who secreted away huge chunks of the KGB archives and later transferred them to the UK. When it collapsed, and in the absence of any other positive (nationalist) values – indeed, bearing in mind their suppression under the old regime – it was replaced by pure materialism, so you had a vast upsurge in treason during the late 1980s and 1990s.

1. This materialism factor was accentuated by the sheer material poverty Russia fell into during the 1990s. Selling secrets for a nice suburban house in California makes much more sense when you are an impoverished civil servant who lives in a khrushchevka and hasn’t been paid for months than when you are getting a PPP-adjusted salary of $2,000, live in a nice modern apartment, and possess a car and can travel to Turkey or Crimea a couple of times a year.

4. Conversely, whereas anti-Soviet dissidents could plausibly imagine that they were betraying an ideology, not their own people, this has become more and more implausible as the gradient of Western ethno-Russophobia veers ever upwards.

1. Another factor could be declining competence amongst Western spooks focusing on Russia. The intelligence services have never attracted the very best – far from the James Bond stereotype of them being suave, well-informed mystery men, in reality they tend to be mediocre, and idiotic conspiracy theories run rife amongst among them – and this should be even more true today, when the best talent is sucked up by Big Finance and Big Tech to an extent unparalleled during the Cold War. Russia Studies have also been neglected and underfinanced since the end of the Cold War until recently, with bigger and bigger jokers taking the limelight with every passing year (from Edward Lucas to Molly McNew). Combine the two trends, and this too would explain a collapse in Russia recruitment.

Tucker: “What is the American national interest that will be served by regime change?”
Senator: “If you care about Israel… we have a strategic interest there.”

I don’t think I have a reputation for panicking. But I do think that we are now at probably the most dangerous point in world affairs since Russian and NATO troops faced off at Pristina Airport in 1999, if not since the Cold War.

It is now clear that there will almost certainly be strikes by the US against Syrian targets in coordination with France, Britain, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar, and that the scope of this attack will be much greater than last year.

• Naval force capable of a cruise missile strike is already off the coast of Syria, namely the destroyer USS Donald Cook and the cruise missile submarine USS Georgia. The destroyer Laboon will soon join up with them, while Carrier Strike Group 8 (USS Harry S. Truman) will be in the area in a week’s time.
• The French frigate Aquitaine is also in the area, and British forces in Cyprus are allegedly mobilizing for strikes.
• Russian Su-24’s have harassed the Donald Cook and Aquitaine, and the Black Sea Fleet has been placed on combat alert. Several senior officials have said there will be military retaliation if Russian troops are targeted, although there have been no clear commitments even as regards that. Current Russian naval forces in the area include two Kilo submarines. From my limited research, the Moskva cruiser is out of theater.
• Trump has canceled scheduled visits to Latin America to instead “oversee the American response to Syria”, while James Mattis has canceled visits to Arizona and California.
• Civilian overflights over Syria have completely ceased as Eurocontrols declares a no fly zone over the East Mediterranean for the next 72 hours.
• The US and Russia vetoed each others Douma investigation resolutions at the UN Security Council. The reason Russia vetoed is that the American version had a reference to Chapter VII, which would have opened an avenue for the US to go to war against Syria – that is, for the same reasons it vetoed the US resolutions in 2017. The Libyan experience taught Russia to pay attention to wording.
• While the US “welcomes” the OCPW mission to establish the facts on the ground, it openly says it will not affect the US decision on a response to Syria (sic). What can one say? At least they’re utterly forthright in their pretensions to exceptionalism.
• There has been a remarkable show of unity over this issue in Europe, and not just the usual suspects. Days after approving it, Angela Merkel chose today to announce that Nord Stream 2 must preserve a transit role for the Ukraine. This kind of annuls its entire purpose and puts the capstone on the Kremlin’s dismal gas policy and outreach to Germany.
• Meanwhile, Congress is already moving to enact further sanctions against Russia (forbids transactions relating to new Russian sovereign debt).

The Western media is beating the drumbeat for war, and unlike in 2003, during the Libyan Crisis, or even last year, I see hardly any skepticism about it in the comments. The few skeptics are invariably labeled Russian trolls. I am really getting the impression that the degree of popular hate in the West towards Russia is approaching what Allied citizens must have felt towards Nazi Germany by 1941. Kudos where its due: Neoliberalism.txt has programmed its peons well.

I still don’t think this will boil over into a major war, but the chances of that are now well above 0%.

If it does, though, it will constitute a stupidly appropriate end to Western civilization as we know it. As one commenter here has noted, current decision-makers make the statesmen of 1914 seem sane and rational.

So it looks like the British reaction to The Skripal Affair is assuming very serious proportions, especially with the most recent allegations that the nerve agent in question was Novichok.

(Incidentally, it is a gas so potent – an order of magnitude more so than VX – that carpet bombing a middle-sized city with it is projected to wipe out most of its population, but was apparently unable to even kill its main target).

PM Theresa May has now given Russia a two day deadline to prove it was not behind the attack, or else… Well, all sorts of wild suggestions are now flying on the Internet how the UK and “the West” ought to “punish” Russia.

I suppose this makes it as good a time to address this topic as any, in approximate order of severity.

Boycott FIFA World Cup 2018

The positive side is that the UK – so, presumably, England – will not have to worry about getting poisoned by the Russians “to slow them down” (as suggested by professional Russia basher Edward Lucas).

Not that anyone would notice.

On the other hand, if they could cajole the other Western countries into boycotting as well, it would be yet another humiliation for the kremlins, who seem to think they can buy their way into international handshakeworthiness by hosting very expensive international sporting events.

On the other hand, I don’t think that’s even a bad thing.

Kick out RT

This is being actively discussed.

This is going to seriously hurt RT’s international operations, since London hosts one of its two main foreign HQs. However, this gives Russia perfectly good cause to kick out the BBC and other British outlets. Hence why pro-Western journalists such as Max Seddon and Alexey Kovalev are beseeching Britain not to do it.

Since RT is not that successful anyway – viewership numbers are underwhelming, and 40% of its website visitors come from Russia itself – this will hurt Britain more than it hurts Russia.

The chances of other Western countries joining in are minimal, but if they do, I suppose the only result will be an across the board fold-up of the remaining major Western news bureaus in Moscow.

Further Financial Sanctions

E.g. prohibiting British investors from buying Russian sovereign debt, but this will have even less of an effect than the US doing it, which Mercouris explained here:

• Russia has massive foreign currency reserves (currently $450 billion) and its budget remains essentially balanced.
• Nothing stops it from floating bonds in the Asian money markets

So the effects from this will be negligible.

Step up Support for the Ukraine

Weapons supplies to the Ukraine are always an option but frankly Britain is unable to substantively change the military balance by itself.

However, the UK could recognize the DNR and LNR to be terrorist organizations.

This will, amongst other things, enable the UK to effect much more aggressive prosecution of Novorossiya supporters, should it also recognize the DNR and LNR to be terrorist organizations (which currently only the Ukraine does). In this case, Graham Phillips and Patrick Lancaster might want to apply for asylum in Russia.

Along with the nuclear/novichok “terrorism,” this will also lay further groundwork to:

Designate Russia as a state sponsor of terrorism

With associated further financial sanctions down the line, should the UK convince the US (realistic if Blackpill Timeline continues to pan out) and the EU (less likely but imaginable) to follow suit.

Cut Russia off from SWIFT

This is not something that the UK, nor even the US, can do by themselves; the organization itself is based in Brussels, Belgium, it is subject to Belgian and EU law, and is owned by its member financial institutions.

When Iran was booted out from SWIFT in 2012, it required the agreement of all 27 EU countries.

Russia has domestic alternatives to SWIFT (РАБИС, БЭСП) for commercial banks, and since 2014, the Mir payment system has been created for ordinary citizens. It is likely that internal transactions can be carried out without a hitch even in the event of a serious Western financial embargo.

As Alexander Mercouris points out, since 2014 the large state-owned banks that dominate the Russian banking system have been effectively cut off from borrowing in Western financial markets anyway. Consequently, it will be Western companies and businessmen with Russian investments who would be the most seriously affected, not to menton SWIFT itself, which will lose out from the loss in Russian institution membership fees.

Export Controls on Tech

Russia depends heavily on European (esp. German) machine tools.

A resurrection of Cold War style export controls on technology transfers to the USSR would hurt Russia badly. But this is not something that the UK or even the US seem to be capable of pushing on Germany and/or the EU.

Confiscate Russian oligarch assets in the UK/The West

This, ironically, presupposes a lack of rule of law in the West to an extent barely even imaginable in Russia. (For instance, nobody was confiscating Poroshenko’s chocolate factory in Lipetsk, to the chagrin of Russian nationalists).

But let’s suppose British judges are willing to overturn a millennium of legal norms just to punish Putler.

First, the UK will, at a single stroke, solve a large chunk of Russia’s problems with comprador elites, who make (or suck out) their money in Russia and spend it in London (Miami, Nice, Courchevel, etc.). The remote risk of losing your money due to a falling out with one of Putin’s henchmen sure beats the certain risk of losing your money by dint of being a “Russian oligarch” in the West.

Second, this will, to a great extent, constitute “friendly fire.” The Russian economic elites, especially those with ties to the West, are far more pro-Western than the population at large, and most Russians in London actually vote against Putin during elections.

Third, far from turning the oligarchs against Putin, it will just increase the already considerable control he has over them even further. This idea that pissed off oligarchs will feed Putin his own polonium tea is a beloved fantasy at places like /r/politics, but in the real world, it is 2018, not 1998, nor even 2003; Russia is no longer an oligarchy, but a “silovarchy” of security men clustered around Putin. With the “oligarchs'” remaining assets parked within Russia, their ability to create trouble for the regime will be even further diminished.

Cut Russia off from the Internet

This would again require the cooperation of the entire West, and if done forcibly – e.g., cutting the underwater cables connecting Saint-Petersburg to the world, as the Royal Navy quietly did to German telegram cables on August 4, 1914 – it would amount to a more or less overt declaration of war.

Will it cripple the Russian Internet? Of course not. The Internet perceives censorship as damage, and reacts by bypassing blockages. The West is not the world; short of NATO seizing control of the entire Russian border, it will retain access to the worldwide web, even though speeds will be much slower. The internal Internet (Runet) should not be greatly affected, since like China, Russia has taken care to build in redundancies that will enable it to function autonomously (ironically, efforts that Russian liberals have long interpreted as part of a totalitarian scheme to cut Russia off from the worldwide Internet).

Seizure of Russian Foreign Gold & Currency Reserves

Obviously, this is not something that the UK can do anything meaningful about, since less than 10% of Russia’s foreign currency reserves are in pounds sterling.

The USD and Euro each account for a bit more than 40% in Russia’s foreign currency basket, as well as a symbolic amount of yuan. Most of Russia’s sizable gold reserves ($80 billion) are parked in Russia itself.

Needless to say, seizing these assets will be illegal, extraordinary, and close to a declaration of war.

If anybody is going to do it in any possible universe, it is going to be the US (Europe is too fissiparous to push something like that through).

I am certainly not one of those people who predicts the Final Collapse of the petrodollar and US imperialism every year. But this will be a real risk if the US does something this insane. While seizing the assets of small and economically irrelevant “rogue states” is nothing special, doing this to Russia – as one of the world’s core Great Powers – will be an entirely different ball game that will discredit the American-dominated global financial system, most critically in the eyes of China (since what stops the US from eventually pulling something similar on them?).

Since this system massively favors America – the US dollar’s global reserve status artificially lowers risk premiums in the US, making foreigners willing to “irrationally” invest in US bonds at rates well beyond equilibrium – its unraveling will likewise hurt the US more than anyone else. This could even be the trigger that snaps the US back down to an economic level more correlated with the quality of its human capital.

Total Embargo

The Russian economy will crater, but Russia is at least self-sufficient in food and energy, while many EU countries – especially the former eastern bloc ones – depend on Russian gas to power their factories and heat their homes during the winter.

Now it’s not like they’ll be freezing to death. However, they will be paying through the nose for LNG imports, and the disruptions from the temporary interruption in Russian oil supplies will plunge the EU and probably the world into a depression.

Over time, Russia will orientate itself towards East Asia, especially China. Despite the necessity of it, this will not be a fast process, due to the paucity of the needed infrastructure as well as Russia’s poor understanding of Chinese realities. But this will be bridged with time, and as China continues to break out into technological leadership, the lack of access to Western tech and knowhow will become less and less of a debilitating factor for Russia.

Assassinate Putin

I do see this seriously suggested every now and then in comments (if not in official rhetoric, thankfully). Hopefully that’s because most non-crazy people recognize the downsides.

Conclusions

Some common themes:

• Most prospective sanctions are some combination of: Ineffective, hurt its initiators as much as Russia, or carry grievous geopolitical implications.
• Are not credibly capable of changing (alleged) Russian misbehavior
• Most of them are likely to stoke even further Russian resentment against the West, discredit its domestic pro-Western forces, and strengthen the regime politically, even where they weaken Russia economically.

But by far the most crucial factor is that those measures that do have the capacity to truly wreck the Russian economy need the cooperation of Asia, and by Asia, I mean China.

This is why Russia’s development of China ties has been Putin’s single greatest foreign policy success, besides which everything happening in Syria is basically irrelevant. No wonder that this development has been consistently decried by the liberal fifth column.

Since nobody knows anything, as Alexander Mercouris points out, I haven’t bothered following this closely.

Still, I suppose it’s big enough that I should post something about it. This comment from for-the-record seems not entirely implausible:

What seems eminently clear is that whoever did it knew that this would be attributed to the Russians, and either didn’t care (a Russian “fuck you” to the West, just like Syria’s repeated gas attacks that everyone knows all about), or actively desired it.

So why not consider the following scenario:

What if Christopher Steele (“author” of the famous dossier), unable to personally travel to Russia, engaged Skripal to dig up the “dirt” on Trump?

What if Skripal either manufactured or was fed “dirt” (false information) by his Russian connections?

What if now, with the heat on Steele, Skripal got nervous (knowing the information he provided was false and that he was in danger of becoming the fall guy, or the guy who knew too much)?

What if Skripal, living alone in the UK, then decided that his life would be more meaningful (and longer) if he were to return to Russia and be close to his daughter?

What if, using his Moscow-based daughter as an intermediary, he came to an agreement that would have allowed him to return to Russia in return for a “confession” about his role in manufacturing the dossier at the behest of British intelligence?

What if this became known to certain people in the UK?

What would their likely reaction have been?

Is this scenario any less plausible than the idea that the Russians would have done this in such a blatantly obvious manner, shortly before their Presidential elections and three months before the World Cup they are hosting?

I suppose we’ll soon see about that.

I suppose if the UK – so, presumably, England – are ordered to boycott the World Cup, they will not have to worry about getting poisoned by the Russians “to slow them down” (as suggested by professional Russia basher Edward Lucas).

Not that anyone would notice.

On the other hand, if they could cajole the other Western countries into boycotting as well, it would be yet another humiliation for the kremlins, who seem to think they can buy their way into international handshakeworthiness by hosting very expensive international sporting events.

January 9, 2017 marks the day I began blogging a decade ago.

Donations

I suppose now’s as good a time as any to launch my second panhandling drive.

If you like the words that I write, and want me to write more of them, you can personally make that happen: http://akarlin.com/donations/

Looking Back

My first (non-intro) post: Reading Russia Right. On rereading it, I see that all of my main themes were already present. I might have perhaps been rather too pollyannaish about Russia’s prospects – after all, I did start off blogging as “Da Russophile” – but I don’t think anything there was actually cardinally wrong.

In contrast to the brief and more personalized account that follows, you can read a more detailed history of my blogging career here: http://akarlin.com/start/

The mid-2000s to the early 2010s were the golden age of blogging, and I hitched myself on about midway through the process.

There were considerable successes – although I never cared much for catering to popular trends, my blog(s) were getting around 750,000 annual pageviews by the early 2010s, despite a nasty pharma hack destroying my SEO ratings in early 2012. I also started openly incorporating HBD insights around mid-2012; just in time to scare off lefty Russophiles (majority in the West then), but too late to be one of its early adopters (I was writing about the importance of IQ from the very start in 2008, but had up till then been careful to maintain racial agnosticism, largely for education/work-related reasons).

But there were failures too. Part of this was due to blogging in general falling into a sort of dark age as social media ravaged community after community like an online venereal disease. But the main reason was that at the end of the day, blogging was a hobby for me. The disparate projects I had tried to launch in 2013 – most prominently, The Russian Spectrum translation portal and The Russia Debate forum – had all floundered, and I was increasingly busy with other things. I produced a total of about 5 posts in 2014. I did have some loose plans to resume serious blogging at that time, but to be fair, I am not 100% sure I would have ended up following through on them. Maybe in an alternate timeline, my blogging career would have ended around then.

But then Ron Unz wrote an email to me on Jan 2, 2015 offering me to resume blogging at The Unz Review, and the rest is history.

I more or less recovered my visitorship and pageview numbers in my first two years at The Unz Review, despite continued depreciation of my old websites, and blasted past them in last year, when I returned to Russia and began doing this and other related things more or less as a job instead of as just a hobby.

That said, I still have some ways to go. For instance, Steve Sailer gets an order of magnitude more pageviews (c.11 million in 2017).

Looking Forwards

What next for the Russia blogosphere?

My impression is that things are becoming dumbed down, very r-selected. The Russia commentary now is dominated by folks who make La Russophobe (remember it?) look like the apex of nuance and reason. Which doesn’t stop the likes of Louise Mensch, Eric Garland, and Molly McKew from having a couple of orders of magnitude more Twitter followers than myself (or other minimally sane people, such as Bryan MacDonald, Ben Aris, or even Leonid Bershidsky).

It has to be admitted that grounding the Russia discourse in reality, a goal which I was seriously pursuing as late as 2013, has completely failed – and that the New Cold War is here to stay, even though it was a ridiculous prospect when Ed Lucas first wrote the eponymous Russia-baiting book. I do not care to participate in this information war on either side of the trenches, since I am not making money off it, and because my goals and values are orthogonal to those of the Kremlin elites and the globalist elites anyway.

With this in mind, I now feel more strongly than ever that I need to put a capstone to my Russia watching career in the form of a book: Dark Lord of the Kremlin.

Yes, yes, I know I have been promising it to my long-suffering readers for years now – but I really do think 2018 will be the year.

Could the increasing inanity/censorship of social media drive resurgence of a blogging?

I sure hope so, but there’s tentative signs that social media usage is falling off.

However, it seems many of them are migrating to other media formats, not back to bloggers.

Video seems like best way to reach the masses.

Our ROGPR YouTube channel (Alt Right politics and video gaming for Russians) now has 4,200 subscribers after half a year of intermittent new content.

People like RAMZPAUL have become media sensations, up to the point that Ron Unz has opened up a videos section on this journal.

This is certainly something I will delve into deeper, though not in 2018. Spreading oneself too thin is a mistake, and one that I have made more times than I should have.

Other potential projects

• Dark Equilibrium: Book length version/expansion of my essay on The Age of Malthusian Industrialism.
• A post-apocalyptic sci-fi book (if I manage to get DLK and DE done this year).
• Apollo’s Ascent: Book length version of this essay. Realistically speaking, not going to happen until 2021 at the earliest, since it’s a massive undertaking and I frankly don’t have the necessary background to adequately realize it yet.

What next for HBD, futurism?

Momentum is building up at a blistering pace, with new discoveries in the genomics of IQ made seemingly every week.

In the long-term, the political hysterias of today (Ukraine, Russiagate, Trump, etc.) will fade into irrelevance, but the future dynamics of genetic editing + IQ augmentation will pretty much determine who gets to rule the 21st century (unless machine intelligence cuts humanity out of the loop early). And I will gradually – especially after the publication of DLK – want to reorient more in that direction after 2018.

Definitely seems a good idea to get in on early on this for both publicistic and commercial reasons.

Dmitry Hvorostovsky, one of the Russia’s best and most beloved artists, died this week of brain cancer.

Main News

• Andrew Higgins: Why Putin’s Foes Deplore U.S. Fixation on Election Meddling

“The Kremlin is of course very proud of this whole Russian interference story. It shows they are not just a group of old K.G.B. guys with no understanding of digital but an almighty force from a James Bond saga,” Mr. Volkov said in a telephone interview. “This image is very bad for us. Putin is not a master geopolitical genius.”

One of the few points on which many svidomy Ukrainians and progressive Americans differ with Russian liberals is that while the former basically view Putin as a God, the latter tend to take a much dimmer view of Putin’s actual talents, influence, and capabilities (for the record, I am sooner in the second camp, though I am not a Russian liberal).

This has resulted in the rather amusing spectable of America’s handshakeworthies and Blue Checkmarks now regularly accusing the likes of Alexey Kovalev and Leonid Bershidsky – both liberal anti-Putinists, who, nonetheless, inhabit the reality-based universe, the one in which Putin is your typical Internet-challenged boomer and a few modest Russian Facebook campaigns are irrelevant for determining the results of an elections whose total costs run into the billions of dollars – of being shills for Putler (see right).

It’s all so hilarious, and I even feel a bit sorry for them, since they’d be much more successful if they didn’t suffer from a certain degree of respect for reality and honesty, like the Russia Experts of the Current Year (Louise Mensch, John Schindler, Eric Garland, Molly McKew, James Kirchick, etc) who make the old generation of propagandists like Ed Lucas appear like paragons of intelligence and objectivity.

• James Thompson: Game Over for Humans?

Commenter CanSpeccy added a cool video:

I have at times speculated about how to increase the effectiveness of terrorist attacks with modern technology. I think one of the most promising ideas that’s already very technically feasible is to mount guns with tracking systems onto drones. Can do a huge amount of damage if you could set it loose at an open air concern or a mass protest…

This slaughterbot idea is even more elegant… but is probably still a decade or two off. First and foremost, it needs to have sufficient intelligence for indoor navigation without the use of GPS, and for face recognition. Both tasks are computationally intensive, so we either need much more progress on minituarization, or a reliable Internet connection to a server farm (wouldn’t it be hilarious to  to be murdered through your own WiFi… or to be saved by Comcast’s incompetence).

Also battery longevity might be an issue, though minituarization is progressing fast.

• More damning revelations about the Kiev Snipergate false flag three years on. (Not that anyone cares by now).

Russia

* LNR Coup – to be covered separately.

• Bryan MacDonald: ‘Scoop’ based on Moscow rumors, another low in British media coverage of Russia.

More on this:

• Alexander Mercouris: Will Putin run again for President? Here’s why he probably will and why he should
• Me: Will Putin Even Run?

• RT: Google will ‘de-rank’ RT articles to make them harder to find – Eric Schmidt

Incidentally, re-net neutrality: I think this is essentially Comcast and Time Warner vs. Google, Facebook, and Twitter on who gets to be Picus News in our cyberpunk future.

• More Google censorship: YouTube removes the channel of Russian Faith, a Christian side project of Russia Insider run by David Curry, without even bothering to cite a reason why.

Hundreds of videos have been lost.

• David Fillipov (WaPo): Russia spent $50 billion on the Sochi Olympics. It might actually have been worth it.

* Mikhail Batin: Patriarch Kirill preaches against transhumanism

• Zhirinovsky unveils his Presidential program [in Russian]. Might write about this later if there’s interest.

World

• Trump/Ballgate. Trump picks his culture wars well. As usual, snarking libs don’t realize they’re getting played.

NFLgate showed them to be unpatriotic. Now they come off as literal dindus.

* Could the Ancients Have Had an Industrial Revolution?

• Mashable: Google is locking people out of documents, and you should be worried

• Izabella Tabarovsky: Eastern Europe’s Dark Past Could Hinder Its Future

Vanagaite’s specific crime was to question whether the celebrated partisan Adolfas Ramanauskas-Vanagas, who Lithuanians honor for his struggle against the Soviet occupation, was an appropriate choice as a symbol for 2018—the year the nation will be celebrating the centennial of its original independence. …

Many Lithuanians had already had enough of Vanagaite with her 2016 book Our People. In it she, an ethnic Lithuanian and descendant of Holocaust perpetrators, wrote openly about her countrymen’s (and her family’s) role in annihilating Lithuania’s 220,000 Jews. She found herself on the receiving end of personal threats and disparagements, including accusations of being on the take from the Kremlin. …

The latest episode, however, seems to have been too much even for most of her supporters. As a result of a public storm, Vanagaite’s long-term publisher Alma Littera severed its relationship with her, announcing that all her five books would be pulled off the shelves and pulped—including those books that have nothing to do with the subject. A patriotically-minded group filed a suit against her with the prosecutor general alleging slander and denigration of memory of a deceased person.

Naturally, this gets about 100x less attention that Russia’s politicization of history.

• Barron’s: Will Traditional Auto Makers Steal the Future From Tesla?

• Result of China dropping its One Child Policy in 2015? Births rise by 7.6% to 18.46 million in 2016, with the biggest increase (+62%!) in Beijing.

Culture War

• The Economist: International, inter-generational poll on what constitutes sexual harassment.